A former US Marine pilot opposing extradition from Australia on US charges of training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers collaborated with a Chinese hacker, Reuters reported.
Daniel Duggan, 55, an Australian citizen, fears that requests by Western intelligence agencies for confidential information put his family at risk, the lawyer said in a statement.
US authorities earlier found correspondence with Duggan on electronic devices seized from Su Bin, Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collery said in a March submission to Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who will decide whether to hand Duggan over to the US after a judge considers Duggan’s extradition case.
Su Bin, who was arrested in Canada in 2014, pleaded guilty in 2016 to stealing US military aircraft by hacking into major US defence contractors. He is listed among Duggan’s seven accomplices in the extradition request
Despite, Duggan denies charges that he violated US arms control laws. He has been in an Australian maximum security prison since his arrest in 2022 after returning from six years in Beijing. The case is set to be heard in a Sydney court this month.
Duggan was reportedly known to Su Bin as an employment broker for Chinese state-owned aviation company AVIC, while being unrelated to the case. Last year, AVIC was blacklisted by the US as a company linked to the Chinese military.
Yet emails retrieved from Su Bin’s electronic devices show he paid for Duggan’s trip from Australia to Beijing in May 2012, according to extradition documents filed by the United States in an Australian court.
The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Navy criminal investigators knew Duggan was training pilots for AVIC and met with him in the Australian state of Tasmania in December 2012 and February 2013. ASIO said it would not comment as the case was before the court.
Duggan moved to China in 2013 and was banned from leaving the country in 2014, his lawyer said. Duggan’s LinkedIn profile and aviation sources who knew him said he worked in China as an aviation consultant in 2013 and 2014. He renounced his US citizenship at the US Embassy in Beijing in 2016, retroactively in 2012, after “open contact with US authorities that may have jeopardised his family’s safety,” his lawyer wrote.
Duggan’s lawyers oppose extradition, saying there is no evidence that the Chinese pilots he trained were military, and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offences.
